GOVERNMENT.—­Closely connected with this social progress, was the progress in constitutional government, the fruit of the charters of John and Henry III.  After the assassination of Edward II. by his queen and her paramour, there opened upon England a new historic era, when the bold and energetic Edward III. ascended the throne—­an era reflected in the poem of Chaucer.  The king, with Wiclif’s aid, checked the encroachments of the Church.  He increased the representation of the people in parliament, and—­perhaps the greatest reform of all—­he divided that body into two houses, the peers and the commons, giving great consequence to the latter in the conduct of the government, and introducing that striking feature of English legislation, that no ministry can withstand an opposition majority in the lower house; and another quite as important, that no tax should be imposed without its consent.  The philosophy of these great facts is to be found in the democratic spirit so manifest among the pilgrims; a spirit tempered with loyalty, but ready, where their liberties were encroached upon, to act with legislative vigor, as well as individual boldness.

Not so directly, but still forcibly, does Chaucer present the results of Edward’s wars in France, in the status of the knight, squire, and yeoman, and of the English sailor, and in the changes introduced into the language and customs of the English thereby.

CHAUCER’S ENGLISH.—­But we are to observe, finally, that Chaucer is the type of progress in the language, giving it himself the momentum which carried it forward with only technical modifications to the days of Spenser and the Virgin Queen.  The House of Fame and other minor poems are written in the octosyllabic verse of the Trouveres, but the Canterbury Tales give us the first vigorous English handling of the decasyllabic couplet, or iambic pentameter, which was to become so polished an instrument afterward in the hands of Dryden and Pope.  The English of all the poems is simple and vernacular.

It is known that Dante had at first intended to compose the Divina Commedia in Latin.  “But when,” he said to the sympathizing Frate Ilario, “I recalled the condition of the present age, and knew that those generous men for whom, in better days, these things were written, had abandoned (ahi dolore) the liberal arts into vulgar hands, I threw aside the delicate lyre which armed my flank, and attuned another more befitting the ears of moderns.”  It seems strange that he should have thus regretted what to us seems a noble and original opportunity of double creation—­poem and language.  What Dante thus bewailed was his real warrant for immortality.  Had he written his great work in Latin, it would have been consigned, with the Italian latinity of the middle ages, to oblivion; while his Tuscan still delights the ear of princes and lazzaroni.  Professorships of the Divina Commedia are instituted in Italian universities, and men are considered accomplished when they know it by heart.